TED Talk Share - “Great Leadership is a Network, not a Hierarchy”

Daily Resource / December 14th, 2022

One of my most hated concepts, in both theory and practice, is gatekeeping or gatekeepers. People or actions that are prescribed to be keepers of knowledge, action, and sometimes growth in a community. Unfortunately, gatekeeping behavior is often a part of learning and working communities. Someone, or a small group, tasks themselves to gatekeeping work or ideas under the guise of keeping up standards within the community and in some ways keeping the ‘wrong’ kind of people or work out. It is something that I just abhor and have experienced too many times to my liking.

Gitte Frederiksen’s TED Talk “Great Leadership is a Network, not a Hierarchy” hit a deep chord with me. Leadership often takes on the role of gatekeeping with workers sharing ideas or their struggles with their leadership and the ideas being struck down or the struggles ignored. Design thinking, on a broad level, shows that if you don’t work with and understand the struggles of all people in an organization then there cannot be any real, substantial changes made to the organization. In her talk, Gitte explores decentralized and evenly distributed leadership with an organization and how within days the organization becomes exponentially higher achieving and empathetic towards each other. She explains that the teams that she has employed this strategy with are high performing teams even before the changes, but these same teams outperform themselves.

At the end of the talk she adds that next time when someone asks who is the leader, say, “I am.” If we could instill this kind of distributed leadership in a school or LEA, I wonder what kind of changes could happen. Teachers with more influence on professional development and PLC time. More time spent exploring the deep changes and needs of a school rather than the surface issues that are results of the needed changes. Distributed, empathetic leadership could be a completely positive shift in how schools are run on a day to day basis.